Back to media blogging after a holiday rest, and I have some catching up to do. A reminder: I post some interesting links throughout the day on Twitter. They’ll show up on the sidebar of the home page or you can follow me.

Print News Fading, Still Source of Much News. This piece at Slashdot isn’t interesting so much for the post itself, but for the unusually thoughtful discussion in the comments. (I say unusually thoughtful, by which I mean the comments aren’t littered with idiotic screeds on how it’s the perceived political bias of the press that is killing newspapers.)

Talk is cheap, but here’s my money. Howard Weaver is really, really choked about a recent Jeff Jarvis column and writes well in defence of McClatchey’s future. Jeff responds in the comments. A good read from both.

Could Canwest go bankrupt? An in-depth look at the troubling stock woes of Canada’s CanWest from Duncan Hood at Maclean’s magazine. The most in-depth piece yet I’ve read on the situation. Don’t both reading the comments: they are almost wall-to-wall about politics.

Mark Cuban: Sports teams should pay for journalism. Mark Cuban has proposed pro sports team fund sports journalists. Kirk Lapointe take a look at the proposal. (It really like it if Kirk did more of this type of in-depth analysis. I know he’s a busy man, but he brings an incisive mind to media issues.)

(Another) Bogus Trend of the Week: a Plague of Shoplifters! I love it when Jack Shafer take a shot at the willingness of journalists to fall for easy ideas that may not really be stories. (One of my favourites of the genre was a local paper which, in advance of release of the movie Fast & Furious — it may have been Fast & Furious II — wrote about “fears” that it would lead to an increase in car thefts, and then after the release breathlessly reported there had been no increase.)

Mark, thank you for adding my blog to this esteemed list. I run an online community of more than 10,000 members and I plan to highlight the community managers of many online communities in my blog in 2009. As a journalist, I feel very strongly that we all have what it takes to do something like Tracy Record and her husband have done with West Seattle Blog. It just takes a different mindset and a small paradigm shift and a willingness to get serious about serving the users, not dictating to them.

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A blog on journalism, media-related matters and some occasional personal stuff, by Mark Hamilton, a journalism instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, in the suburbs of Vancouver, B.C. You can email me or follow me on Twitter.